Events

This afternoon, leading figures from academia, industry, government and philanthropic foundations will gather at the Big Data in Biomedicine conference at Stanford to explore the vast opportunities for mining the growing volume of public health data and develop new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat disease.

The event runs today through Friday and features 32 speakers representing large information-technology corporations, startups, venture-capital firms and the research community. As a reminder, those unable to attend in person can tune in to the live webcast and submit questions for panelists by visiting the conference website.

Additionally, we’ll be live tweeting the conference keynote speeches by Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder of personal-genetics company 23andMe (which starts around 1 PM Pacific time today) and David Ewing Duncan, author of Experimental Man, as well as other proceedings from the conference. You can follow the tweets on the @SUMedicine feed or by using the hashtag #bigdatamed.

Previously: Big Data in Biomedicine conference opens this week, Stanford computer scientist shows stem cell researchers the power of big data, Atul Butte discusses why big data is a big deal in biomedicine and Stanford and Oxford team up for conference on “big data’s” role in biomedicine

The Big Data in Biomedicine conference kicks off at Stanford this week. The event, which will be held at the School of Medicine’s Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge, is bringing together leading figures from academia, industry, government and philanthropic foundations to discuss the burgeoning opportunities for mining the vast amounts of biomedical data housed in public databases. Here’s a look at the schedule.

For those unable to attend the conference in person, the event will be webcasted via the Big Data in Biomedicine website. Throughout the three-day event, we’ll also be live tweeting the keynote talks from Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder of personal-genetics company 23andMe, and David Ewing Duncan, author of Experimental Man, as well as other proceedings from the conference. You can follow the tweets on the @SUMedicine feed or by using the hashtag #bigdatamed.

Previously: Obama’s new open-data policy aims to boost access to federal data for entrepreneurs, researchers, Stanford computer scientist shows stem cell researchers the power of big data, Atul Butte discusses why big data is a big deal in biomedicine and Stanford and Oxford team up for conference on “big data’s” role in biomedicine
Photo by Wellcome Images

With conversations still fresh in the air about Angelina Jolie’s decision to remove her healthy breasts as a protective measure against a high probability of cancer, Susan Love, MD, cancer survivor and author of the best-selling book on breast cancer, couldn’t have been a more apt keynote speaker at the fourth annual Stanford Women’s Health Forum yesterday. She gave a forward-looking talk titled “A Future Without Breast Cancer: Where Are We and What Can We Do.”

We don’t understand the normal breast… If we’re really going to prevent breast cancer, we have to understand it

The forum was an event focused broadly on women’s health issues, but breast cancer and cancer survivorship were major topics – with many of the 400 attendees also hearing from Mark Pegram, MD, director of Stanford’s breast cancer program, and Allison Kurian, MD, an assistant professor of oncology at Stanford whose research is focused on hereditary breast cancer. (Kurian, in fact, had spent much of her day Tuesday answering questions from the press about Jolie.)

Love, who told the New York Times yesterday that she wants people to understand that “we really don’t have good prevention for breast cancer,” described to the audience how the state of knowledge about the breast and breast cancer is far from adequate. She said:

We don’t understand the normal breast… You’d think we’d know, but we really don’t. That’s a whole area that’s been ignored and it’s another thing we have to push people to do – to not just look at the disease. If we’re really going to prevent it, we have to understand how it works, to figure out what the early changes are. Isn’t it a shame that the only thing Angelina has to do, knowing she has the (mutant) gene, is to have a normal body part cut off – because we don’t know how to prevent breast cancer?

…

We’ve got awareness. We don’t have to work on that; we have to go beyond that to be part of finding the solution, to demand better research and to be part of it. I think we can be the generation that ends breast cancer.

Videos of this and other talks will be posted soon on the Stanford Center for Health Research on Women and Sex Differences in Medicine (WSDM) website.

Previously: Breast cancer advocate Susan Love to deliver keynote at Stanford Women’s Health Forum, Stanford’s Mark Pegram discusses breast cancer in the genomic age, Helping inform tough cancer-related decisions, BRCA patients use Stanford-developed online tool to better understand treatment options and A closer look at preventive breast cancer surgery

This fall, innovative thinkers engaged in using social media and mobile computing applications to improve health-care delivery and advance the practice of medicine will meet Sept. 27-29 the School of Medicine for the Stanford Medicine X conference. Registration for the three-day event is now open.

The conference will be held at the Li Ka Shing Center for Learning & Knowledge and feature presentations and panels covering a variety of topics, including patient-centered design, participatory medicine, crowd funding for health projects and the impact of information technology on biomedical research. More details on the conference program from our release:

Delivering the opening keynote at the conference is Maryland high school student Jack Andraka, winner of the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award. Andraka invented a novel paper sensor that detects pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancers in five minutes and costs a mere 3 cents.

Also delivering a keynote speech is John Sculley, former president of PepsiCo and past CEO of Apple Inc. One of America’s best-known business leaders, Sculley is a vocal advocate for health innovation and mentor to an elite group of health-care entrepreneurs.

New to this year’s conference is the Medicine X Master Class program, a series of small-venue seminars taught by experts in specific disciplines. Confirmed master-class speakers include Roni Zeiger, CEO of Smart Patients; Susannah Fox, an associate director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project; Sonny Vu, CEO of Misfit Wearables; Bertalan Meskó, MD, founder of Webicina; Wendy Sue Swanson, MD, pediatrician and author of the Seattle Mama Doc blog; Bryan Vartabedian, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine; and patient advocate and artist Regina Holliday.

The early registration deadline is June 15 and space is limited. To register, visit the Medicine X website.

More news about Stanford Medicine X is available in the Medicine X category.

Photo by Stanford Medicine X

Tomorrow, Stanford will host its second TEDxStanford event. The event, which rapidly sold out, is being webcasted live beginning at 11 a.m. Pacific Time.

The theme for this year’s event is “Break Through” and the schedule includes an impressive line-up of speakers from classrooms and laboratories across campus. Among the group are bioengineer and geneticist Russ Altman, MD, PhD, and electrical engineer Krishna Shenoy, PhD.

Altman leads Simbios, a National Institutes of Health Center for Biomedical Computation at Stanford. His research focuses on how human genetic variation affects drug responses and the analysis of biological molecules to understand the action, interaction and adverse events of drugs. He co-authored a paper published in March showing that the Internet search history of consumers can yield information on the unreported side effects of drugs or drug combinations.

Shenoy, who directs the Neural Prosthetic Systems Lab, works with engineers and neuroscientists to determine how the brain controls movement and to design medical systems to assist those with movement disabilities. He also co-directs the Neural Prosthetics Translational Lab, where these advances are used to help individuals with severe motor disabilities.

As reported in a past Stanford Report story, Shenoy and colleagues studied brain activity in monkeys reaching to touch a target and showed “that the brain activity controlling arm movement does not encode external spatial information – such as direction, distance, and speed – but is instead rhythmic in nature.”

Join the webcast tomorrow to hear more about Altman and Shenoy’s fascinating work and latest research advancements.

Previously: Researchers mine Internet search data to identify unreported side effects of drugs, Thousands of previously unknown drug side effects and interactions identified by Stanford study, Unexpected drug interactions identified by Stanford data mining, Researchers find neurons fire rhythmically to create movement and Stanford researchers uncover the neural process behind reaction time
Photo by Tamer Shabani Photography

From future stem cell researchers to budding international health experts, a crowd of aspiring physicians and scientists - about 45 Stanford MD and MD/PhD students – presented new research here last week at the 30th annual Stanford Medical Student Research Symposium.

An online article I wrote on the event describes a few of their projects, from a novel idea on screening premature babies for potential brain bleeds to the use of new immunosuppressant drugs to increase cell survival rate in cardiac stem cell treatments. I’ve covered this event several times now as a reporter, and I’m repeatedly amazed by the level of scientific research that medical students - many of whom work over the summer or during their “free” time – somehow squeeze into their busy schedules.

Laurence Baker, PhD, a professor of health research and policy who has been responsible for directing medical student research for the past five years, was on hand for the event, and he talked with me about the students’ successes:

“Stanford has a great history of encouraging student research. There is really a culture here that fosters this,” Baker said. Pointing to the wealth of original research findings on display, Baker said that all medical students at Stanford complete at least one research project, and most produce multiple studies. More than half of all medical students have papers in publication by the time they graduate. “Most students are doing new research. They are making a contribution to science.”

Previously: New class of physician-scientists showcase research
Photo of first-year medical student Thomas Roberts by Norbert von der Groeben

The number of gene-expression data sets available in public databases has climbed rapidly over the past decade, allowing researchers to spot disease trends without doing time-intensive experiments in the laboratory. The “big data” deluge promises to accelerate the process of understanding disease while driving down the costs of developing new therapies.

To underscore the wealth of opportunities for scientists who can mine these continuously growing databases in innovative ways, Stanford Medicine and Oxford University are sponsoring a three-day conference next month on big data’s role in biomedicine. The event will be held May 22-24 at the School of Medicine’s Li Ka Shing Center for Learning & Knowledge and will feature keynote speeches from Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder of the consumer-genomics company 23andMe, and David Ewing Duncan, author of Experimental Man. In addition, attendees will hear from more than two dozen speakers representing large information-technology corporations, startups, venture-capital firms and academia.

In a release, Stanford systems-medicine chief Atul Butte, MD, PhD, who is the conference’s scientific program committee chair, commented on the motivation for hosting the conference and what participants will learn at the event:

We’re bringing together people from academia, industry, government and foundations who want to learn more about how big data can drive innovation for a healthier world… We expect that attendees will walk away from this with a strong understanding of the latest tools and technologies available for studying and using big data in biomedicine, of where the unmet medical needs are and how they can be addressed with these approaches, and of what the tractable next steps are that they can take to become innovators.

Additional program information and registration details are available on the conference website.

Previously: Mining data from patients’ charts to identify harmful drug reactions, Strength in numbers: Harnessing public gene data to answer a diverse range of research questions, Mining medical discoveries from a mountain of ones and zeroes, The data deluge: A report from Stanford Medicine magazine, Stanford’s Atul Butte discusses outsourcing research online at TEDMED and Health-care experts discuss opportunities and challenges of mining ‘big data’ in health care
Photo by Dwight Eschliman

A founding mother of the breast cancer advocacy movement, Susan Love, MD, will kick off this year’s Stanford Women’s Health Forum with a talk, “A Future Without Breast Cancer: Where Are We and What Can We Do,” at the May 15 event.

Love is a clinical professor of surgery at UC Los Angeles and president of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation. After dedicating years of her life to patient advocacy, she became a patient herself when she was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia last year; she recently shared her experiences as a patient on a New York Times blog.

In addition to Love, the free community event will feature experts from throughout the School of Medicine. From our release:

Previous health forums have been “an opportunity for people in the community to learn about important medical issues affecting women and about the groundbreaking research done at Stanford,” said Lynn Westphal, MD, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology… “At this year’s forum, anyone who has been touched by cancer, either personally or through a loved one, will benefit from the discussions.”

Other speakers at the forum will discuss a variety of topics, including breast cancer diagnosis, risk and surgery; headaches during sexual activity; contraception; stress and survivorship; lung cancer in nonsmokers; cancer-related sleep problems; weight-loss diets; colorectal screening and cancer; facial rejuvenation; and sunscreen and skin cancer prevention. Among the Stanford speakers will be headache specialist Robert Cowan, MD, clinical professor of neurology and neurological sciences; oncology professor Mark Pegram, MD, who directs Stanford’s breast cancer program; and nutrition researcher Christopher Gardner, PhD, associate professor of medicine.

The forum is being presented by the Stanford Center for Health Research on Women & Sex Differences in Medicine (known as the WSDM Center). Registration for the half-day event is now open.

Previously: A call to advance research on women’s health issues, Exploring sex differences in the brain, Stanford 2011 Women’s Health Forum videos available on the web, Women’s Health Forum videos online and Nancy Snyderman speaks at Stanford Women’s Health Forum

Tomorrow, around 140 students from ten local high schools will arrive on the Stanford campus to participate in our annual Med School 101 event.

Designed to expose high-school students to medicine and related fields, the event is organized by the medical school’s Office of Communication & Public Affairs and sponsored by Stanford Hospital & Clinics. At the day-long gathering, students will attend sessions at the Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge on a range of medical and scientific topics. They’ll hear from some of the country’s top experts and get the opportunity to engage in hands-on activities such as performing surgery on simulated patients.

We’ll be live tweeting sessions from Josef Parvizi, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences; Gilbert Chu, MD, PhD, professor of oncology; Sakti Srivastava, MD, associate professor of surgery, and other event happenings throughout the day. You can follow the coverage beginning at 9 AM Pacific time on the @SUMedicine feed or by using the hashtag #SUMed101.

Previously: Med school: Up close and personal, A quick primer on getting into medical school, Teens interested in medicine encouraged to “think beyond the obvious” and High-school students get a taste of med school
Photo by Norbert von der Groeben

As a New York Times’ science and health reporter, Pam Belluck has written about many different health-related subjects – fetal surgery, hospital delirium, Alzheimer’s disease and the donation of HIV-infected organs. Next week, as part of the Stanford Health Policy Forum series, she’ll discuss her work in a conversation with Paul Costello, chief communications officer at the medical school.

“Health Care in Practice: A Journalist’s Perspective,” will take place on March 20. A flyer (.pdf) for the free event offers more details.

Belluck joined the Times in 1995 as a general assignment reporter on the metropolitan desk, and she began covering health and science in 2009. She is also author of Island Practice, a book about an eccentric doctor and the adventures and challenges of his community on the island of Nantucket.